Re: [Usability] Overthinking things.

[kerberos piestar net]

Quoting Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>:

> Am Mittwoch, den 09.12.2009, 22:50 +0800 schrieb Lincoln Yeoh:
> > I think in many cases having/requiring the user/"bug" submitter
> > "talk" directly to the developer may not be the best way of doing
> > things. And instead someone else should be between the two.
>
> That's what a Bugsquad is for, as developers should have time to code
> instead of having to discuss too much with users. To avoid
> misunderstandings, please note the "too much" in this sentence.
> For GNOME, see http://live.gnome.org/Bugsquad/ .
>
> > For example, I've seen users being asked to split their bug reports
> > into multiple bugs.
> >
> > If the system requires users to convert a _valid_ "stuff is broken"
> > report into multiple bug reports, before broken stuff gets fixed,
> > then it just makes things less likely to be fixed. The users might
> > actually have alternatives they can use, so they go away and stuff
> > stays broken. The developer may feel that's fine with him/her, but it
> > does not help the project.
>
> This might get a bit off-topic, anyway, for a better understanding:
>
> I'm one of these people asking users to please file only one issue per
> report in GNOME Bugzilla. That's also described in
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/page.cgi?id=bug-writing.html .
> If users spend a minute before dropping all their issues into one bug
> report, maybe even without providing steps to reproduce, it would make
> changes to get stuff fixed way more likely. :-)
>
> The problem behind it all is that all manpower is limited (hence I don't
> split reports myself) and that too much noise in a report kills
> motivation of developers to fix it by crawling through a long,
> complicated, unclear and unstructured text.
>
> Please note that I'm polarizing here. Of course there's also lots of
> good reports (I'd say the huge majority is very helpful).
>
> andre

All the bugs I have ever filed with Ubuntu have sat unread for years  
before being marked as 'Invalid' by an automated system.  Apparently  
2+ years later I would have to check if they are still relevant before  
they might, if I was lucky, get looked in to or maybe be fixed upstream.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-network/+bug/33443
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-network/+bug/33446
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/33447

My foray into bug reporting resulted in a two year wait then a  
flagging as 'Invalid'.  If you honestly think that usability issues  
should be addressed using this sort of system you're having a tufnell.

Anyway I've said that usability issues cannot be handled by a  
bugtracker - especially if there doesn't appear to be time to look  
into legitimate network bugs.  A seperate mechanism is required for  
identifying and solving usability issues which does not seem to be in  
place.

Creating a list of bugs and usability issues will inevitably have the  
bugs at the top, the usability issues at the bottom, and the manpower  
to tackle no more than 1/5th of it - ensuring that usability issues  
never get tackled.